Oculus’s Head of Video Eugene Wei has left Facebook, according to an update on his personal blog. Wei joined the virtual reality company in late 2015 to lead video efforts after previously holding product exec roles at Flipboard and Hulu.
Wei detailed that he left the role in mid-July. The exit would have come just a few weeks after Facebook suddenly shut down Oculus’s in-house… Read More

Veteran Facebook exec Andrew “Boz” Bosworth is taking over consumer hardware efforts at the company, including projects under groups like Building 8 and Oculus. The announcement was made internally by Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, Business Insider reports.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the appointment to TechCrunch.
Bosworth, who joined Facebook in January of 2006, has been… Read More

Video is the name of the game in social networking: sites like Facebook and Twitter have been doubling down on the medium in recent years to drive more traffic and engagement from users, and also as a platform to snare more premium advertising away from traditional television broadcasters. Now Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is hoping to muscle in on the party with its own video strategy. Read More

Facebook is giving its “Safety Check” feature a permanent home in its app and on the desktop, the company announced today. The feature, which lets you check to see whether friends and family are safe following a crisis, will now have its own dedicated button in the app’s navigation menu and will be available via the Facebook website on the desktop. Read More

Should your parents be able to read your Facebook messages if you die? Facebook explained why it won’t let them in a post in its Hard Questions series today about social networking after death. Facebook admits it doesn’t have all the answers, but it has come up with some decent solutions to some issues. Read More

Ever gotten tricked into clicking a fake play button on Facebook that opens a link instead of starting a video? I did, repeatedly, and wrote a story in 2014 titled “Yo Facebook, Ban Links With Fake Video Play Buttons”. Now Facebook is doing just that. Today it started downranking the News Feed presence of links that display a fake play button in the preview image, as well as… Read More

Roughly 1 in 30 Facebook users tells someone Happy Birthday each day, showing Facebook’s first major emergent behavior is still going strong. Now Facebook is equipping the 45 million people sending birthday wishes each day with some new features. Now instead of just posting a soulless “HBD” or “Happy Birthday!” on someone’s wall with no personal message,… Read More

Taking inspiration from line drawings, Reddit and Messenger, Facebook is overhauling the design of the News Feed to make it more legible, clickable and commentable. Meanwhile, Instagram today got a little redesign itself with comment reels now being threaded so you can have sub-conversations in public. Read More

Facebook is rolling out a “Trending News” section on mobile that includes its own link in the app’s main navigation. This follows the company’s earlier announcement this spring of a redesign for Trending Topics, an increasingly important part of Facebook’s social network, where it tracks the news stories that are buzzing across its service. That redesign is… Read More